Implisiete etiek in die brief aan Filemon

This brief letter written to Philemon by the apostle Paul contains various issues about which there is much uncertainty among interpreters. As a result the ethics of Philemon is described in many different ways. When researchers describe the ethics of Philemon an obvious ethical issue arises from the letter, namely the issue of slavery. Discussions on the theology (and ethics) of Philemon, with one or two exceptions, focus on the slavery issue – researchers follow the same underlying pattern in their description of the theology and ethics of Paul’s Letter to Philemon, namely that they reduce the ethics of the letter to Paul’s handling of the slavery issue. This study aims to investigate this tendency in the study of the ethics of the Philemon based upon the following hypothesis: If one follows another, more comprehensive approach to the ethics of Philemon – as apposed to one that only focuses on the slavery issue – a fuller/ better/ more comprehensive description of the ethics of the letter can be achieved. This hypothesis was tested by specifically making use of the more comprehensive approach to New Testament ethics prescribed by Ruben Zimmermann, namely the model of “implicit ethics”. The aim was, by applying the different phases of the model to the text of Philemon, to demonstrate how the ethical reach of the letter stretches much further than the slavery issue.